60% of small companies close within six months of a cyberattack not because their technology failed. Because nobody knew the difference between RAID, backup, archive, and business continuity
RAID protects you from hardware failure. When an engineer accidentally deletes data at 3 PM on Friday, the RAID will mirror that deletion perfectly across every drive. You’re not safe from human error, ransomware, or corrupted data.
Backup protects against mistakes and attacks. It’s a company’s time machine. Snapshots let you restore data if things go wrong. But backup doesn’t optimise for cost, plus it doesn’t care about the 92% of data that you’ll never access again but can’t (or are too afraid to) delete.
Archive is where your data lives forever, as cheap as possible. Finished projects, regulatory data, footage from 2019 that needs to be kept until 2026. Active Archive will let you restore data faster but at a cost, a Cold Archive will take 12-72 hours.
Business Continuity is what keeps operations running when systems go down. Anything from hot standbys, redundant sites, this is infrastructure that means your customers don’t notice the outage.
Think of this in automotive terms. RAID is your airbag; deploys during a crash. Backup is your car insurance; pays to fix what broke. Business continuity is your courtesy car; keeps you running while the repairs happen. Archive is long-term parking; cheaper rates but with a longer walk to retrieve your vehicle.
The confusion between these costs companies millions. Teams store backups on production storage, keep archives on backup systems, or rely on RAID as their main protection. Here’s the framework: RAID for uptime. Backup for recovery. Archive for retention. Business continuity for failover. They’re not alternatives, they’re layers of risk management.
Your car insurance makes it clear if you have comprehensive cover with courtesy car and roadside assistance. Your data protection should be just as simple to explain.